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Friday, October 07, 2011

Each Friday we highlight a wine from the Northwest that we think is a real "find." By find we might mean that it's a steal, as all of these wines we'll feature weekly are under $20. We might also mean "Hey, you really need to go find this" and it might be a wine that we feel not enough people know about. In any case, with the weekend pending we're hoping to help you "find" a wine to kickoff the weekend right. We'll tell you a little bit about the wine and try to help you track it down here in the Northwest.

With this week's Friday Find, we continue our exploration of the many amazing Northwest red blends. You will often hear the Owen Roe's Abbot's Table described as a crowd pleasing wine, a great go-to wine for entertaining. The
2010 Abbot's Table will not only please the crowd, it will impress. Why? For
around $20, this wine delivers in a big way, perhaps the best Abbot's Table
yet. Although released only a few weeks ago, this wine is surprisingly
cohesive. It has vibrant aromas and flavors of juicy dark fruit, cherry
and hints of chocolate, balanced with good
structure and smooth tannins. This is an expressive wine, drinking very well
now, but has the structure for some bottle age as well.

David O'Reilly's blend varies from year to year. It is a seemingly eclectic
mix of varietals from Yakima Valley fruit. The 2010 is atypical in that
Sangiovese comprises 48% of the blend, more than twice the amount in each of
the previous 3 vintages. Sangiovese is not typically at the forefront of
O'Reilly's wines, but clearly it works beautifully here. The remaining blend is
15% Blaufrankisch (also known as Lemberger), 14% Zinfandel, 14% Malbec, 7%
Syrah and 2% Merlot. The 2009 blend included 20% Cabernet Sauvignon and 13%
Grenache, yet the 2010 has neither. Spinning off into the fascinating world of
winemaking details is not always “crowd pleasing”, so the takeaway here is this
wine is worth finding. Due to vintage conditions in 2010, only about half the
normal production of this wine was made. Consider putting it on your short
list.

After recently tasting through other new Owen Roe releases, I sought out this wine since I had not tasted
it at the winery. By the first sip, it was apparent that this was a winner.
Owen Roe wines are well distributed in many Northwest grocery stores, such as
New Seasons and QFC, and many local wine shops.